Someone in game room 2 was asking me for an example way to balance armor, so I wrote one. It’s just an example and not necessarily the best solution (for example, you could use a geometric series to have defence scale with level), but I thought it might find general interest.

If you’re receiving d damage every s seconds, that’s d/s dps you’re being hit with. A defence of a (standing for armor) should mean that instead of d damage, you receive d(1-a/100)/s dps. Your time to live with health h is approximately (remember, the damage on the shot that kills you “wastes” any damage past bringing you to 0 health, so this has some error in it) h/(d(1-a/100)/s) = hs/(d(1-a/100)). Taking s/d as an unknown (it’s enemy seconds per damage), that’s spd * (h/(1-a/100)), so h/(1-a/100) is the number you want to maximise.

Unfortunately, heavy armor has inappropriate scaling. If you compare heavy and medium armor at the same level and rarity, medium armor consistently has a higher value for h/(1-a/100).

I haven’t tested the dev’s claims, but the developer claims that defence is percentage based.

If you’re receiving d damage every s seconds, that’s d/s dps you’re being hit with. A defence of a (standing for armor) should mean that instead of d damage, you receive d(1-a/100)/s dps. Your time to live with health h is approximately (remember, the damage on the shot that kills you “wastes” any damage past bringing you to 0 health, so this has some error in it) h/(d(1-a/100)/s) = hs/(d(1-a/100)). Taking s/d as an unknown (it’s enemy seconds per damage), that’s spd * (h/(1-a/100)), so h/(1-a/100) is the number you want to maximise.

I resolved it by loading up one of the games from the quest; as soon as the game loaded I got the medal. Hopefully they can fix the bug, but I’ll leave these posts here so anyone else who encounters the issue knows how to resolve it themselves.

I can’t do the first boss on ButtonHunt 3; my machine doesn’t behave the way yours does in the video, and following the directions exactly just fails repeatedly. I’ve even helped other people with the level, so I’m sure I’m doing it correctly.

Also, I agree with Bong on the refusing business thing. It’s a freedom of speech issue, I suppose, and while I disagree e.g. with the KKK, who hate me because I am jewish, I am absolutely opposed to making it illegal for them to hold their opinion, or even for them to voice said opinion. If they start inciting riots, or asking people to kill me, then I have a problem, but not until then. Similarly, if a business is privately owned, I think the owner should be allowed to serve exactly who they like and no one else; it’s no one’s business but theirs who they serve. Like Bong said, you can vote with your money and take your business elsewhere; you have as much right NOT to eat there as they have not to serve you.

I’m a libertarian, and my view on health care is that public health care is a disastrously bad idea – see e.g. Canada. A much better idea is spending tax money to give everyone health insurance. I expect my government to help people when utter disaster strikes, such as a hurricane; I don’t see a severe health concern as different. Note that once you let the government have a vested interest in the health of its citizens, laws I normally oppose which only prevent someone from hurting him or herself, such as motorcycle helmet laws, become no longer inherently nonsensical. I think the best way to deal with THAT is to simply make abiding by rules like that necessary for the insurance to apply; so, your government health insurance won’t fix that broken leg if you weren’t wearing a helmet, by example.

On the other hand, I also see plenty of merit in simply leaving health care alone; it’s no news to anyone that wealthier people can buy more stuff. It’s inherent to capitalism. While some things clearly shouldn’t be subject to this – rich people shouldn’t be able to buy better justice, for example, hence government-appointed lawyers – I’m not so certain I have a problem with rich people affording more health. I am also a big, big fan of letting people have the right to be miserable, so if a wealthy person chooses not to buy said health, I don’t know that I’m interested in providing it with tax dollars.

To be honest, I’d probably go with the second way unless it turned out that my country simply wasn’t functioning – that is, it turned out that health care, like the justice system, simply couldn’t tenably be handled by capitalism – in which case I’d switch to providing insurance. Under no circumstances would I provide health care itself.

I agree about the badge filter idea. I would also like to see a better filter system when browsing the games, like being able to specify “games posted between this and that date between this and that rating and so on and so forth”. Also, I’d like to request a way to specify in your profile what chat room you use, rather than having Kong move me about randomly when I log in.

No matter what I try, I can’t get the chat to work, so I thought I’d try posting in here for help. Some info:

The flash game works fine, and I definitely downloaded and am running flash 9. The chat simply says that it is unable to connect, and the red light is on. The browser is mozilla firefox. Also, this is a recent issue – as of a week ago, I think, the chat was still working, then it stopped, but I don’t recall if I changed anything on my end, and of course Kong might have updated in that time. To my knowledge no firewall is blocking port 5222 on my computer.

Second of all, what my chat looks like (I’d submit a screenshot, but I don’t know how to embed an image in a post, and I haven’t got my own server I could link to).

Connection Failed!

A connection could not be established to the Kongregate chat server.

Yellow triangle with a ! in it.

Attempting to reconnect…

Funky swirling circle made of radial lines of varying width.

Neither the flash nor the chat seem to work for me, period, in IE – I see the advertisement just fine, but the chat never loads, nor does the game – I just see a black box where the game should be and a grey box where the chat should be.

Since no one is replying, and I can’t find any way to check the server status myself, I guess I’ll assume the problem is in my computer, since if it isn’t I can’t fix it, let alone find it.

Any thoughts here? The chat room used to work on this box, whose only updates I’m aware of were updating Firefox, which I run on Windows XP. Javascript and Flash both certainly work, and my firewall is not reporting any blockages when I try to connect; even turning the firewall off entirely doesn’t help. I run two plugins which could potentially be causing an issue, noscript and adblock, but I turned them both off and the chat room still won’t work.

I’m especially stymied since a) the chat room used to work and b) the site still works for me – I can log in or out, and I can play the flash games. In fact, if the chat room were implemented AS a flash game, I could probably use it! :-P

While I doubt it is a problem in my computer itself, as I haven’t historically had a problem connecting to the server – and of course my internet connection itself is working, since as I said I can play the games, and as you can see I can read and post on the forum – my ISP is a bit sketchy, and if the chat server is a different computer from the web server – which is likely – I wouldn’t be surprised if my local router simply couldn’t find the chat server.

None of which is the point. Thanks to both of you for trying to help me troubleshoot, but what I’m trying to get at is a way to check the server’s status so I can easily tell whether or not troubleshooting is called for, now and in the future.

I’m having trouble connecting – games work, but the chat doesn’t, and so obviously I also can’t get any badges. I was wondering if there was a place on the site where I could check server status, to make sure it’s a problem on my end?

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